While technical writers need to have good computer skills,
they do
not necessarily have to write about computers all
their lives.
"Technical" comes from the
Greek techne, which simply means "skill".

Every profession has its own special specialized forms of
writing.
Police officers, lawyers and social workers all write
specialized reports
-- and someone has to learn, perform, critique, and teach
each one.
Every major politician hires staff members to design,
administer, and
analyze surveys -- and to write the secret reports that get
leaked to
reporters. Somebody has to design tax forms and the
accompanying instruction
books, assembly instructions for toys, and scripts for product
demonstrations
or multimedia presentations.

For a large project, a technical writer may work with a
graphic designer,
an interface designer, several computer programmers, and a
staff of
freelance writers to design a huge web site. For a small
project, or
for a small company, the tech writer may be expected to do all
of the
above, all alone.

The first rule of technical writing is "know your audience."
Writers who know their audiences well are in a position to
suggest and
implement solutions to problems that nobody else
identifies.
Whenever one group of people has specialized knowledge that
another
group does not share, the technical writer serves as a
go-between.
But technical writers are not just translators, accepting
wisdom from
experts and passing it on unquestioningly; they also are in the
business
of generating truth, by choosing what gets written, and
for whom,
with the full knowledge that later readers will depend on the
accuracy
of what has been written.

Whoever writes the first draft sets the agenda.

Whenever I find myself writing the first
draft of
a collaborative document, about 80% of it gets published
more or less
as I drafted it. When other people show me their first
drafts, I tend
to change very little -- unless I really care about the
topic, or
I have a lot of time on my hands.

My sister is a
computer programmer who,
when she
just started out, happened to distinguish herself by being
very good
at taking notes during meetings. Her colleagues began
stapling her
notes to the official minutes. As a result, she was in a
key
position to resolve disputes about what did or didn't happen
at a
particular meeting, or to offer opinions about how a
particular project
was progressing. (These are the skills that enable employees
to move
out of the cubicles and into the offices with windows.)

On
the web, where the most senior people in an
organization typically
spend the least time on the Internet, younger webmasters can
have
a disproportionately large effect on the way the world
perceives the
organization.

Technical editing may involve working with brilliant
researchers
and scientists, who may be world-class experts in fluid
dynamics
or swine reproduction, but who may not know a paragraph from a
participle.
Some of these will be eternally grateful for your help, and
others
may resent your interference.

Good technical writers are also
good teachers. They excel at explaining difficult
concepts for
readers who will have no time to read twice. Technical writers
have
an excellent eye for detail. They know
punctuation, syntax,
and style, and they can explain these rules to
authors
who need to know why their drafts need to be changed.

Although they typically work on their own for much of the
time, they
also know how to coordinate the collaborative work of
graphic
artists, programmers, marketers, printers, webmasters, and the
various
"subject matter experts" (SMEs), who know all the answers
but have never bothered to write them down anywhere.